Past and Future Lives of Grendel (Presentation)

Past and Future Lives of Grendel (presentation) Good afternoon. This talk is something that grew out of the fourth chapter of my dissertation, which I’m still writing, so your feedback will be a lot of help. As a way of briefly framing my argument, the basic premise of my dissertation is that if we look at the way texts are produced and reproduced on the internet, that that serves as a useful model for looking at the way texts were produced and reproduced in the middle ages. Until now, for the most part, we’ve been looking at medieval textual culture through the lens of print culture. I’m focusing on three processes that together shape textual production on the internet and in the middle ages -- aggregation, renarration, and curation -- and today I’ll be primarily focusing on curation: effectively the choices made in both physically and mentally grouping texts together, and how they can be used to read Grendel’s monstrosity. First I’m going to talk about Grendel as a monster in his manuscript context, how he looks when we contextualize him as part of the set of monsters in the Nowell Codex. Then I’m going to look at Grendel and the way he appears in three recent films -- Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf, Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf and Grendel, and Howard McCain’s science-fiction remix, Outlander. Both of these contextualizations -- manuscript and film -- create a set of generic conventions that we can use to build up the idea of what it means to be a Grendel. Once I’ve done that (and time permitting), I’ll use those analyses to give a little insight into how these curated monsters can help us to generate new readings of the Grendel of the Old English poem. Beowulf, the poem, sits second to last in a manuscript called the Nowell Codex. While the dating of the poem is a subject of unending debate, the paleographical evidence strongly suggests that the manuscript dates from around the turn of the eleventh century. There are five texts in the Codex: The Passion of Saint Christopher, The Wonders of the East, The Letter from Alexander to Aristotle, Beowulf, and Judith. All of these deal, if not with monsters specifically, then at least with monstrosity. The Passion of Saint Christopher tells of the martyrdom of the cynocephalic (that is, dog-headed) Saint Christopher, and his death at the hands of the pagan king Dagnus. The Wonders of the East and The Letter from Alexander to Aristotle both talk about the strange sights you might see should you travel east, and Judith is a retelling of the Biblical narrative, in which the titular hero uses her feminine wiles to get close to Holofernes, the head of an invading army, and behead him in a drunken stupor, ensuring victory for the Hebrews. While Judith may not contain any obvious monsters, Andy Orchard has admirably demonstrated that Holofernes’s actions -- and, indeed, the text’s descriptions of him -- make him the monster of the text. Now, I mentioned that I would be building up a set of monsters in each case, and the way I’m going to do it is actually following JJ Cohen’s “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in which he writes a series of hypotheses about all monsters, and uses them to create a picture of what it means when we say “monster.” In my case, though, I’ll be picking out the similarities within a smaller group, in this case asking the question “what do the monsters in the Nowell Codex have in common?” This should tell us a little bit about what monstrosity means in one context, through identifying the Codex’s generic conventions. To make things a little easier to say, I’ll be calling “Monsters of the Nowell Codex” “N-monsters” -- N for Nowell -- from now on. The first rule of N-monsters is that N-monsters are hybrids. Everything about Saint Christopher is, in a sense, “half.” Named in Old English as “healf-hundinga,” the other half must be understood to be human. His language is human, but his appearance is monstrous; his faith is saintly, but his power appears -- at least to Dagnus -- to be inhuman. According to Joyce Tally Lionarons, Christopher sends the reader (and Dagnus) into what Marjorie Garber has termed “category crisis”: “a failure of definitional distinction, a borderline that becomes permeable, that permits of border crossings from one (apparently distinct) category to another: black/white, Jew/Christian, noble/bourgeois, master/servant, master/slave ”1 to … which Lionarons might well add monster/human when speaking of Christopher.2 In fact, according to JJ Cohen, “the cynocephalus is monstrous because of its hybridity Miscegenation made corporeal, he has … no secure place in a Christian identity structure generated around a technology of exclusion.”3 Christopher, as a go-between, halfway between human and animal, is monstrous; but it is not, as Dagnus thinks, on account of his height or his death-defying power. Christopher is monstrous because his hybridity either knocks down the walls that generate the identity of the almost certainly Christian audience, or else because it reveals those supposed walls to have been absent from the start. The same can be said for other N-monsters. There are many strange and wonderful creatures in the Wonders of the East, but the vast majority of them are described in terms of hybridization. There are animal-animal hybrids, human-animal hybrids, and even male-female hybrids. The first, the animal-animal hybrids, are the most straightforward. The next, the human-animal hybrids, include the cynocephali (called conopenae) which are said to have horses’ manes, boars’ tusks, and dogs’ heads (horses manna ond eoferes tuxas ond hunda heafdu, 18-19, ll.~25). There are others, but for the sake of time I won’t categorize all of them here. Female hunters (hunticgean 26-27 ll.~85) who domesticate predatory cats represent the third kind of transgression of boundaries, this one between male and female. While the fact that they are described as donning horses’ hides (horsa hyda) for clothing might make them seem part-animal, it is the beards than run down to their breasts (swa side oð hyra breost 26-27 ll.~85) -- likely coupled with their ‘masculine’ hunting ability -- that truly hybridizes them. 1 Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: CrossDressing and Cultural Anxiety, New York: Routledge, 1992, 1617. 2 Lionarons, Joyce Tally. “From Monster to Martyr: The Old English Legend of Saint Christopher.” in Timothy Jones and David Sprunger (eds.) Marvels, Monsters, and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations. Studies in Medieval Culture 42 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002) 167. 3 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 134. But there are some monsters that just seem like humans with selective gigantism -- giant ears, extra-long legs, and so forth. These, I argue, are actually human-giant hybrids. In Genesis chapter six there are giants. These loomed large in the imagination of the Anglo-Saxons, especially, one might argue, in that of the Beowulf-poet, who traced the lineage of his hall-wrecker back to Cain and Abel and the first fratricide.4 In two articles, both titled “Cain’s Monstrous Progeny in Beowulf,” Ruth Mellinkoff convincingly argues for connections between the lineage of Cain, gigantism, and the east.5 While the exact process by which the “giants [that] were on the Earth in those days” (Gen. 6.4) came into existence sometimes varies, Cain’s descendants seem to remain the lone constant: “no matter how the mating was construed, the genealogical descent of wicked progeny was traced, on one side or another, to Cain.”6 This makes Grendel a hybrid as well. The only text in which this hybridity trend becomes suspect is in the case of Holofernes. One could argue, based on the poet’s description of the pagan king as deofolcunda, that he is to be seen as a kind of human-demon hybrid: the -cund suffix (like the modern “-kind”) denoting both likeness and genealogical origin. This is something he would share with Grendel, if perhaps only spiritually or metaphorically. Nevertheless, as we will see later in discussion of our third N-monster hypothesis, Holofernes is not the only character whose nature dangerously crosses boundaries or, in a sense, hybridizes. For the sake of expediency, and also because they’re closely connected, I will describe the second and third N-monster rules together. The second is that N-monsters are only found elsewhere in time and place; the third is that this distancing allows them to more safely take the category confusion of hybridity a 4 Augustine, City of God 15.23 5 Mellinkoff, Ruth. “Cain’s Monstrous Progeny in Beowulf, Part I: Noachic Tradition.” AngloSaxon England 8 (1979): 143162; and “Cain’s Monstrous Progeny in Beowulf, Part II: PostDiluvian Survivial.” AngloSaxon England 9 (1980): 183197. 6 Mellinkoff, “Cain’s Monstrous Progeny Part 1,” 148. step further, by blurring the lines between the supposed heroes of the texts and their monstrous counterparts. All of the texts take place elsewhere in time and space -- from the vagueries of “the east” to the temporal distancing of Biblical narrative or the heroic germanic past of Beowulf. In doing so they create a situation in which the intended audience will never encounter these creatures in real life. This is important, because each of the narratives demonstrates that not only does monstrosity create category confusion, but that even being in the same text as monstrosity does too.

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